Don’t Just Create, Curate with These 5 Content Curation Tools

In the early days of the internet, finding information was akin to standing with a bucket trying to catch the raindrops.  Today, we stand with our buckets ready, but instead of raindrops, we get a deluge.  There is so much information available, but it is often dispersed across the internet on different sites, blogs, forums, and social media platforms.  Content curation is designed to help us handle the flood without drowning.  On the business side, it ensures that their drops are the ones that make it into the bucket.

What is content curation?

A curator finds, categorizes, organizes, and shares the most relevant content related to a specific topic with his/her network.  Just as the Internet makes everyone a publisher, it also allows anyone to be a curator.  In fact, when you share a link on Facebook or LinkedIn, you are curating for your network.  Businesses and websites just do this on a larger scale and for a more extensive network.  Creating original content is important, but collating it into something manageable for readers will have a few benefits for businesses, chief of which:

• It will help sites achieve a higher page rank.
• It establishes your expertise on a specific topic or standing in a particular industry.
• Curation encourages repeat traffic.  You become a reliable, neutral source for information and value. You are trustworthy.

Luckily, there are a variety of tools available to make content curation easier.  Here are our favorite curating services to help you get started:

• Gobundlr. This tool will automatically identify content from Twitter, SlideShare, Flickr, YouTube, and a few other sites that you may want.  You can also select specific content to add to your bundle.  What do you do with your bundle?  You can publish it as a webpage or embed it in another page, such as a blog.
• Curatedby.  A Chrome add-on, Curatedby provides a “Curate” button next to tweets so you can easily and quickly add them to your bundle.  You can also curate content from other web sources in the same bundle.
• Keepstream.  Social media is the core of this service; you can connect social accounts and add tweets to your collections.  Collections, like bundles, allow you to select the content you want to save, and you can also follow content collections created by other people to receive more relevant updates.
• Redux.  Video content is highlighted as it gets more attention from readers, so it is more easily accessible.  You can find content silos for specific topics, and each of these has a “most popular” section.  This is a great way to pull video for your network.
• Bag the Web.  You can create bags, which contain original content and links.  This allows you to integrate your own writing with other resources.  You can also follow users, recommend bags, comment on other curated content, and embed your bags on your site or blog.

Content creation is only going to grow more important as more content is continually published.  By taming that content, you are providing an invaluable service to visitors – and to your own SEO efforts.